Invoca hits 100-employee mark, opens SF office

Santa Barbara-based marketing technology firm Invoca has passed the 100-employee mark, opened an office in San Francisco and hired a bevvy of new executives.

Invoca makes a platform that helps companies close more sales when customers call in. The company has raised $30.8 million from investors that include Santa Barbara-based Rincon Venture Partners, Palo Alto powerhouse Accel Partners and Salesforce.com.

“We hit the 100 mark two weeks ago, and we’re closing in on the 120 mark,” CEO Jason Spievak told the Business Times. “What’s happened here is that the round we just closed with Accel and Salesforce.com is a growth round for us.”

Inovca was the fastest-growing company in the Tri-Counties last year, with 2013 revenue of $5.2 million, up 654.5 percent since 2010. About 100 of the company’s positions are in Santa Barbara, and it has 30 more open positions in sales, marketing and software development, Spievak said. Invoca started out tracking calls like clicks, helping advertising networks attribute sales commissions to the calls that generated them. It has evolved into a more comprehensive service used by brand-name companies to have the same kind of insights into customers who pick up the phone and call as customers who click a website.

“These calls can be worth anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars each to the businesses they’re calling,” Spievak said.

The company also announced that it has promoted Chief Marketing Officer Eric Holmen to president. It also recruited several new executives:

• Kevin Ferguson, senior vice president of sales, joined after 20 years of experience at Oracle Corp., Eloqua and Glass Lewis & Co. and other firms in setting strategic direction, building teams and running global sales organizations.

• J. Scott Hamilton, vice president of business development, joined after having built and sold three technology companies during the past 15 years. For the last decade he has focused on Web-based software telephony products and services at VoodooVox and ResponseTap, with a particular emphasis on media attribution, call tracking and analytics.

• Kyle Christensen, vice president of marketing, spent more than 15 years working in enterprise software. Before Invoca, he was a vice president of marketing at Responsys, where he launched the company’s mobile product line and drove the growth of the enterprise business up until the company’s acquisition by Oracle for $1.5 billion.

• Lisa Riolo, vice president of customer success, has more than 20 years executive experience managing several startup and early stage businesses. Before Invoca, Riolo co-founded Impact Radius, a marketing technology company and Workzones, a Santa Barbara-based co-working business. She also served as an executive at Commission Junction, where she was responsible for driving revenue and establishing client development services.